Category: Open Access Week

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Open Access Week 2014 Screening of “The Internet’s Own Boy”

In honor of Open Access Week, the LACUNY Scholarly Communications Roundtable and JustPublics@365 invites you to a screening and discussion of The Internet’s Own Boy.

Friday, October 24, 2014
3-5pm
Borough of Manhattan Community College, Rm N780
Snacks will be served. RSVP not required. Open to all.

This documentary examines the life and contribution of internet and information activist Aaron Swartz. Swartz penned the Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto in 2008, two years after he freed the Library of Congress’s bibliographic data by posting it on OpenLibrary (LoC charges for access to this data) and the same year he liberated public court documents from expensive fee-based access through PACER (there are now Chrome and Firefox plugins called RECAP that provide a means for free downloading from the database). Come honor the life of Swartz and discuss ways that his work might be built upon and continued by those of us in the library and higher education communities.

For more information, please contact the co-chairs of the LACUNY Scholarly Communications Roundtable: Jean Amaral (jamaral@bmcc.cuny.edu) and Karen Okamoto (kokamoto@jjay.cuny.edu).

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Curl Up with a Good (Open Access) Book

Don’t just look inside on Amazon — get Twelve Years a Slave for free from archive.org!

This just in from LaGuardia Community College, in honor of Open Access Week 2013:

LaGuardia’s library has 28 older model e-book readers (Sony Reader Touch PRS-600) that have been used with specific classes in past semesters. The library is now making these e-book readers available to the college community. The readers are old devices (no wireless, no extra features, b&w screen) but work fine for just reading e-books. They can be checked out for 3 weeks just like a print book.

The Sony Readers are pre-loaded with 25 open access and public domain books ranging from recent novels by Cory Doctorow to Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (read it before/after seeing the movie!) to the Works of Edgar Allan Poe (great for Halloween!) — here is the complete list of titles.

If you’re not at LaGuardia Community College, that doesn’t mean you can’t read these books. They’re open access, so of course you can read them (see the list of titles for links to the full text) — you’ll just have to read them on your own device.

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Happy Open Access Week!

Open Access Week is here! There are lots of great events across the university this week, check out our Open Access Week 2013 page to see them all.

And of course there’s a dizzying array of blog posts, news, tweets, and other information about OA activities around the globe this week. Here are two that caught our eyes:

Open Access guru Peter Suber wrote a terrific article in The Guardian this week called Open Access: Six Myths to Put To Rest, a must-read for any open access fan who advocates for OA in their department, college, university, or profession.

Sarah Werner, a digital humanist who works at the Folger Shakespeare Library, wrote a great post on her blog about negotiating her contributor’s contract for a book chapter she authored. As Barbara Fister’s Library Babel Fish column in today’s Inside Higher Ed reminds us, book chapters often fall through the cracks when we talk about OA, and it’s great to see folks trying to free their work in books as well as journals.

Happy Open Access Week to all! Please share your thoughts, strategies, and observations in the comments.